Van Jones: Bioneers by the Bay and the green economy

There are two U.S. economies: One is collapsing, even as another struggles to rise. The economy that is crashing is the one based on consumption, debt and environmental destruction. The emerging one is based on production, smart savings and environmental restoration.

Call it the green-collar economy.

As blue-collar jobs are shipped overseas and white-collar strategies careen from bubble to bailout, we have a chance to accelerate an historic economic transition. We can replace the present mess with a new economy, one that honors the Earth while delivering work, wealth and health to everyday people.

The truth is we can’t base a national economy on credit cards. But we can base it on solar panels, wind turbines, smart bio-fuels and a massive program to weatherize every building and home in America.

You can’t have a stable economy based on unregulated greed at the top. But you can have one based on unleashing green solutions at the bottom. Millions of green jobs would be a Main Street solution to the Wall Street meltdown.

The question is: How do we get them? We need government action to prime the pump and jumpstart the process. Smart public investments can spark a green economic renaissance, leading to millions of private-sector jobs.

A new report, entitled, “U.S. Metro Economies: Current and Potential Green Jobs in the U.S. Economy,” released by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, says that we can create over 4 million green jobs if we aggressively shift away from traditional fossil fuels toward alternative energy and a significant improvement in energy efficiency.

Another report, entitled, “Green Recovery: A Program to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low-Carbon Economy,” just released by the Political Economy Research Institute and the Center for American Progress, shows that the U.S. can create 2 million jobs over two years by investing $100 billion in a green economic-recovery plan. The report also shows that this investment would create four times more jobs than spending the same amount of money within the oil industry.

Sustainable-living and social-justice conferences like Bioneers by the Bay, Oct. 23-26 in New Bedford, are playing their part in stimulating a new green economy. These conferences mobilize civil society, raise awareness and educate and inspire citizens to begin demanding services (fueled by trained skilled labor) to improve the energy efficiencies and lower the carbon footprints of their homes and communities.

But to achieve these goals, real leadership is required from the top. The next president could have a dramatic impact. Green For All (the organization I lead) and our partners are proposing that he establish a national Clean Energy Corps. Its goal would be to finance the retrofitting of the nation’s building stock, through a revolving-loan fund of $3 billion per year. It would create close to 120,000 green jobs a year (600,000 over five years) while lowering home-heating and electricity bills for homeowners and small businesses. The program would largely pay for itself in energy savings within five years.

The New Apollo Program is a comprehensive economic-investment strategy developed by the Apollo Alliance to build America ’s 21st Century clean-energy economy and dramatically cut energy bills for families and businesses. It estimates that the investment of $500 billion over the next three years would create more than 5 million high-quality green-collar jobs.

Proposals like these will accelerate the development of the nation’s vast clean-energy resources and move us toward energy security, climate stability, and economic prosperity. And it will transform America into the global leader of the new green economy.

Bundled together, a massive green economic-stimulus package like this could even pay for itself in energy savings and in tax dollars generated by new jobs and businesses. We just found $700 billion. Let’s find another $350 billion. That’s half the price tag of the Wall Street rescue, which has no guarantee of success. But with $350 billion investment, we absolutely and positively could retrofit and repower America using clean, green energy — and create millions of new jobs in the process. In other words: a “green bailout” could give America twice the bang . . . for half the bucks

America’s number-one resource is not oil or mortgages. Our number one resource is our people. And it is time to put our people back to work — retrofitting, reinventing, re-imagining and re-powering America.

That’s what Bioneers by the Bay and the green economy are all about.

Van Jones is president of Green For All and the author of: The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems (Harper One). See connectingforchange.org for information on the Bioneers by the Bay program in New Bedford, or call (508) 748-0816.